Man Drying His Leg, about 1884
Gustave Caillebotte. Private collection. Photo by Lea Gryze, Berlin. © Private collection, Berlin, 2024.
Gustave Caillebotte’s portrayals of modern life in the 1870s and 1880s are strikingly centered on men—capturing their fashion, demeanor, and daily lives with a rare and intimate focus. Unlike his fellow Impressionists, Caillebotte turned his gaze toward male figures, presenting them as professionals, athletes, workers, family members, and even as nude subjects.
Join Gloria Groom, Winton Green Curator of Painting and Sculpture of Europe at the Art Institute, and André Dombrowski, Frances Shapiro-Weitzenhoffer Professor of 19th Century European Art at the University of Pennsylvania, for a lively discussion of the language of masculinity in Caillebotte’s work, and discover how his paintings offer a nuanced view of gender that continues to resonate today.
About the Speakers
André Dombrowski is the Frances Shapiro-Weitzenhoffer Professor of 19th-Century European Art in the Department of the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Cézanne, Murder, and Modern Life (University of California Press, 2013), which is winner of the Phillips Book Prize, and Monet’s Minutes: Impressionism and the Industrialization of Time, which appeared with Yale University Press in 2023. He is also the editor of the 2021 Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Impressionism.
Gloria Groom is Chair and Winton Green Curator, Painting and Sculpture of Europe, and executive director of initiatives in France at the Art Institute of Chicago. Gloria has been involved in numerous major monographic exhibitions and their accompanying catalogues, including the exhibition Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men (2025), Monet and Chicago (2020–21), Manet and Modern Beauty (2019), Gauguin: Artist as Alchemist (2017), Van Gogh’s Bedrooms (2016), and Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity (2012–13).
If you have any questions about programming, please reach out to museum-programs@artic.edu.
Closed captioning will be available for this program. For questions related to accessibility accommodations, please email access@artic.edu.
